Why you need a 360 degree marketing approach for apps

If your app marketing is reliant on a single channel, then you are setting it up to fail

When you develop a new app, all your focus on is how great your app is. But most of the developers forget that once the app is developed you need to have the right marketing strategy in place in order to reach your potential customers. This is the time when you need to decide if you are going to focus on a single marketing channel to promote your app or apply a 360 degree approach. This article will explain you why it’s important to exploit multiple channels for your marketing efforts, but before that let’s get to know what is Single and Multi channel marketing.

What is Single Channel Marketing?

Single channel marketing tends to focus on one type of marketing activity. Let’s say if you want to get more downloads for your app, you are only investing in SEM (Search Engine Marketing) ads or are only focusing on ASO (App Store Optimisation) or only promoting it through Social posts at a given point of time. This approach is called Single channel marketing.

What does Multi-Channel marketing mean?

Multi-Channel Marketing refers to the use of different marketing platforms to get a message across. One channel is no longer enough. Consumers now expect to be able to interact with an organization/product in a number of different ways.

Why Multi-channel Marketing?

An average adult uses four and a half connected devices to access the internet.

Businesses need to understand that multi-channel marketing can keep them in touch with their customers anywhere, anytime. So let’s take a look at some of the advantages of multi-channel marketing over single channel.

Price optimization and User segmentation

By using a single channel approach, a marketer can never segment user data such as which channel performed better, what caused user retention and what was the average acquisition cost. In the case of multiple channel marketing, marketers can utilize different types of media devices and platforms in order to secure optimal pricing and campaign optimization.

Below is the data from xcubelabs.com that shows the different user acquisition platforms and the percentage use by marketers.

If we look at the above stats, it’s evident that keeping a 360 degree approach is of utmost importance for User acquisition. If you invest in only one channel, you’ll lose out on rest of the numbers.

About 52% of all apps lose at least half of their peak users after three months. By analyzing data from different channels, you get numbers for which channel is performing best in terms of user retention and how much you should invest in a particular channel. This makes multi channel marketing more cost effective and targeted.

Free vs Paid marketing

Most of the single channel marketing practices involve paid marketing as we are investing all the time and money in one channel at a time whereas in multi channel marketing you can utilize both free and paid platforms simultaneously.

This in turn makes multi channel marketing more cost effective in the long run. Content marketing generates 3 times as many leads as traditional outbound marketing, but costs 62% less. Using a multichannel digital marketing strategy allows business owners to use their resources more efficiently by keeping their operational expenses to the minimum.

The primarily free marketing strategy not to forget about is App Store Optimization. It helps acquire users through the place to go when it comes to download apps: the App Store itself. Through optimizing discovery within app store searches, top charts or featured section, you can be found by a significant higher number of users, likely to download your app.

Better Branding

Multi-Channel Marketing can enable you to engage with an audience on a frequent and interactive basis leading to a better brand image. Talking to your customers continuously on social media makes your app more user friendly and more referable to friends and family.

This case study shows over 120% increase in daily activity for Owaves app due to visual social media campaign. The campaign involved a social media competition to engage better with its followers. In the Share your campaign, users had to share their day as visualized through the app to Facebook, Instagram or Twitter, and the person with the most "likes" or retweets would win.

The marketing team even included influencers in their campaign. They asked the influencers to send them their daily routine and a photo. The team would then create their image and share it.

They are contributing towards their ASO with the help of PR and influencer marketing. Below is a great example of how they used Instagram to target customers as well as increase brand value by including influencer.

More feedback and reviews

Being active on multiple channels allows you to get important feedback from your existing customers who in turn makes it easier for app developer to resolve any issues with the app and make it more user friendly.

Businesses can answer queries more instantly via platforms like Twitter and Facebook which would not have been possible if the focus was only on one marketing channel. Also, when someone is satisfied with a particular service, a good review will contribute towards overall ASO of the app. As we know Customer review is one of the most important factors that contribute towards Play store ranking.

A good example is Lyft app who are taking their social media game to another level.

Edge over competition

With more than 2.2 million apps present in Google play and about 2 million apps in App store, it’s pretty evident that every app has to face a huge competition whatever the category may be. Whereas single channel activities can fetch you downloads to a certain extent, you need other hacks to surpass competition.

A great example is Runtastic app as it’s making use of a lesser used channel- Pinterest. As your competitors might be having huge marketing budget to run ads on conventional social media networks, you need to find channels that will give you edge over your competitors quickly and organically.

Runtastic has a family of fitness apps. They currently have about 21 boards on Pinterest, focused on different target audiences.

There are more women than men on Pinterest, so you will notice that their content is more targeted towards women.

One of their posts has been pinned to more than 4.6K boards.

Customer loyalty

Among the best ways that you can show your customers that you truly appreciate them is to recognize them. People enjoy being acknowledged. This is a time taking strategy and can be only implemented in a multi channel marketing model. Send thank you note via email to your customers, encourage them to share a photo on Instagram or even ask for reviews on Play store. This practice leads to better customer retention as well as better referral programs for your app.

An example is Pocket App. Pocket app constantly shares interesting content with its community on Facebook and Twitter. They also have a unique hashtag #MostSaved that they use to share content that is worth saving.

To conclude, a Single channel marketing approach is no longer sufficient to interact with modern day consumer. With multi-channel marketing strategy, apps can leverage all the tools that can help them connect with the target audience and have a long lasting impact. Moreover, concentrating not only on one distribution / marketing channel widens your chance to get your app downloaded more frequently.

Thanks to Thomas for sharing his advice and opinions in this post.
Thomas Kriebernegg can look back on over 10 years of experience in Online Marketing and 5 years in App Marketing. He is an app enthusiast and the CEO at App Radar, an online App Store Optimization Tool that helps app developers understand and optimize their app store appearance.